Privacy Policy

Short version: we collect the minimum needed to run the site, we don't run ad trackers, and we never sell your data. Here's the whole picture.

What we collect

Account information. If you create an account: your email address, display name, and sign-in credentials, managed by our authentication provider (Supabase). If you sign in with Google, we receive your email and basic profile from Google.

Subcool AI conversations. Questions you ask our AI assistant and its replies are stored with your account so your conversations persist, and your questions are processed by OpenAI to generate answers. Don't put sensitive personal information in chat.

Lounge messages. Messages you post in the Lounge (our shared watch-and-learn room) are public — anyone on the page can read them — and are stored with your display name and account.

Photos you upload. Grow photos and avatars you post are stored and delivered by our CDN. Before a photo is published, we strip its hidden metadata — including any GPS location your camera embedded — so your pictures never reveal where they were taken.

Activity on the site. If accounts features are enabled for you: Fuel Points activity, votes, and content you unlock. Standard server logs (IP address, pages requested, timestamps) exist at our hosting and CDN providers for security and debugging. They live in a short rolling window at the provider, are never joined to your account, and we don't keep our own copy.

Patreon membership. If you connect a Patreon account, we receive your Patreon name, email, and pledge tier — that's how your membership unlocks here. Billing happens entirely on Patreon; we never see or store your payment details.

Push notifications. If you turn on push, we store a delivery address for your device (a subscription endpoint) and use it for exactly one thing: sending you the notifications you'd see on the site. Turn push off any time from the bell or your browser settings, and dead endpoints are deleted automatically.

Your voice. When you speak a question (the mic button or Grow Room mode), your audio is transcribed to text by OpenAI and the text joins your conversation like a typed message — we don't keep the audio itself. Spoken replies in Subcool's voice are generated by ElevenLabs, and we log the seconds used against your membership's monthly voice time.

On your device only. Playback positions (Keep Watching), shuffle and loop preferences, your chat display name, and your age-gate confirmation are stored in your browser's local storage. They stay on your device; clear your browser data to remove them.

How the AI learns about you

The heart of this site is an AI version of Subcool that gets to know you the way a mentor would. To do that, it processes what you share here: your conversations with it are summarized (topics, strains, experience level you've mentioned); photos you post are analyzed so it can comment on your plants; your public Safety Meeting messages are read so it knows how you like to interact; and questions asked in the room help us decide what to teach next. All of this builds a private profile used for one purpose: personalizing your experience and improving the site's teaching. It is never sold, never shared with advertisers, and never used outside subcool.com. When you rate one of his answers (the thumbs under every reply, in the chat and in the rooms), or a keeper corrects one, that verdict and the corrected text are used to improve his answers — including to teach his voice. Ratings are tied to the answer, not published under your name. You can see much of what it knows on your own Dossier tab, you can switch the learning off at any time under Settings → Subcool AI → “Let him remember me” (he then answers from the archive alone and learns nothing new about you), and you can ask us to delete the whole profile (see Your rights below). When you delete your account, your photos are removed from our media servers too; copies already cached at the edge can take up to 30 days to stop resolving.

Location: we don't track it

We do not collect or track your location. No GPS, no geolocation lookups tied to your account, no location history. The only place a location appears is if you choose to type a region into your own profile — and you can leave it blank or keep it as vague as you like. As noted above, we also remove location metadata from every photo you upload.

Direct messages are temporary

Member-to-member direct messages are automatically and permanently deleted after 90 days. We keep DMs out of the AI's learning entirely, and we don't archive them — the only exception is that a message flagged for violating our no-marketplace rule keeps its flagged excerpt as a moderation record. Ninety days is the most anyone — including us — can ever look back on.

Automated safety scanning

To enforce our no-marketplace rule and keep the community safe, automated systems scan content posted on the site — including direct messages — for attempts to buy, sell, trade, or ship cannabis products or seeds. Humans review only what the system flags. This is the one purpose messages are scanned for; nobody is reading your DMs otherwise.

Law enforcement & legal process

We disclose personal information only when required by valid legal process, and we review every request for legal sufficiency. Because we practice data minimization — no location tracking, no ad profiles, metadata stripped from photos — what we hold is limited to what this page describes.

Cookies

We use cookies for one thing: keeping you signed in (authentication session). No advertising cookies, no cross-site trackers, no analytics pixels.

Who processes data for us

Supabase (database and authentication), Fly.io (hosting), Bunny.net (media delivery), OpenAI (AI answer generation and voice transcription), ElevenLabs (spoken replies in Subcool's voice), Google (only if you choose Google sign-in), Patreon (only if you connect a membership), and Resend (transactional email such as account notices). Each receives only what its job requires. We do not sell or rent personal information to anyone.

What we don't do

No ads. No data sales. No third-party analytics or tracking scripts. No marketing lists you didn't ask for. The archive is the product, not you.

Backups and retention

Your photos and rescued archives live on our media servers, and once a week a second copy is made into private, encrypted storage so a hosting failure can't erase ten years of someone's grow pictures. The database gets the same treatment: a weekly export into that private storage, keeping the last four. Backups mirror the live site: when you delete something, the photo copy is removed at the next weekly run, and when you delete your account every database export is removed on the spot and a fresh one is made without you in it. Direct messages are deleted after 90 days as described above.

Age

This site is for adults 21 and over. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 21; if you believe someone underage has created an account, contact us and we'll remove it.

Your rights

You can delete your account yourself under Settings, which removes your data and your photos, and you can stop the AI learning about you there too. You can also request a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account and its data entirely. Email info@subcool.com and we'll handle it — including rights under laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act and the GDPR where they apply to you. We don't discriminate against you for exercising them.

Changes

If our practices change, this page changes first, with a new effective date. Meaningful changes will be noted plainly at the top.

Contact

Privacy questions: info@subcool.com. See also our Terms of Use.